My aim is to offer insights into some of the more subtle principles underpinning prints. The commentary is based on thirty-eight years of teaching and the prints and other collectables that I am focusing on are those which I have acquired over the years.
In the galleries of prints (accessed by clicking the links immediately below) I am also adding fresh images offered for sale. If you get lost in the maze of links, simply click the "home" button to return to the blog discussions.

Condition:
well-inked and crisp impression trimmed to the image borderline. The sheet is
in a poor condition (i.e. significant losses, abrasions, stains and age-toning)
with old restorations.

I am selling
this exceptionally rare print—so rare that the British Museum only has a copy
of it—for AU$337 (currently US$255.80/EUR241.22/GBP208.27 at the time of this
listing) including postage and handling to anywhere in the world.

If you are
interested in purchasing this major print by Testra, please contact me (oz_jim@printsandprinciples.com)
and I will send you a PayPal invoice to make the payment easy.

This print has been sold

From a personal
standpoint, this etching is a visual crystallisation of Testa’s life in terms
of what he valued and his attitude to death. What I mean by this bold assertion
is that this etching celebrates the key principles that he valued and his
acceptance that his work would live on despite setting himself on the dreadful trajectory
of committing suicide.

Regarding Testa’s
principles, he believed that the foundation to a good art education was the study of nature. Indeed, to quote from Elizabeth Cropper's (1984) “The Ideal of Painting:
Pietro Testa’s Düsseldorf Notebook”, Princeton, “Testa castigates those poor
teachers who tear their pupils away from the nourishing breast of Nature,
feeding them instead such weak gruel that they fly into the arms of Ignorance” (p.
248; cited in Cropper [1988] “Pietro Testa”, p. 71).

Testa signifies
his belief in the importance of studying nature by portraying the infants
towards the centre of the composition drawing on tablets in the “proper” way.
To the left of them Testa depicts a reclining figure in the act of painting
with another artist behind him surveying the painter’s progress. This small
interaction may be viewed as Testa’s second stage in an ideal student’s
development: adding colour to drawing. Seated beside the painter is another artist
who is drawing architectural elements. This component in an artist’s
development is also important as Cropper (1988) points out: “Testa argues that
the perfect painter must also master the principles of architecture" (p. 71).

I
could keep working my way around each group of figures as each adds another
dimension to Testa’s notions of ideal art practice, but the element that really
catches my attention, and best summaries Testa attitude to art is
shown at the lower-right corner of the composition: a man lying in a way
that suggests his arms are bound behind him and beside him is a winged hourglass and a scythe. This figure is a constrained Father Time who is not able to
hold his symbolic attributes. Of course, the significance of portraying time
Father Time in this way—an ineffectual force that can no longer cut folk down and
limit their stay in the world of the living— is that philosophically art can
never die even if the artist may pass away. For me, the symbolism of this figure foreshadows Testa’s acceptance of his approaching death by suicide and the
fact that we can still admire his artwork today.